Twice a Spy (10 page)

Charlie reckoned that his father might be correct about the volcano. Drummond had always had an uncanny ability to retain volumes of what he—and usually he alone—considered interesting pieces of information. Upon learning that Drummond had spent his life as a spy
rather than an appliance salesman, Charlie recognized that the Interesting Pieces of Information functioned like Clark Kent’s plain business suit and thick eyeglasses, hiding the hero beneath. Sometimes the information offered Charlie critical glimpses of Drummond’s unconscious. Other times it was drivel.

“But you said there was one survivor.”

“Right,” said Drummond. “Cyparis was his name, as I recall, and he was protected from the thirty-six-hundred-degree Fahrenheit ash and poisonous gas because he was underground at the time, in a stonewalled cell in the town jail, awaiting hanging. After the lava cooled, he became a star attraction in P. T. Barnum’s traveling circus.”

Charlie was given hope in his own predicament. “The only sure thing about luck is that it will change,” he said. An old track adage.

Drummond regarded him strangely. “Where are we?”

Make that a 3 on the lucidity scale, Charlie thought. “A guess is over whatever country has Mount Pelée in it.”

“Mount Pelée? That’s at the northern tip of Martinique, the eastern Caribbean island that’s an overseas department of France.”

Charlie hadn’t imagined Martinique being so expansive but, rather, a beach-rimmed dot of an island. Like Drummond, he gazed out the window. Red adobe roofs began to show through the forest. As the jet descended, the roofs grew closer together, soon outnumbering the trees. Lights from other buildings, streetlamps, and streams of vehicles created a glowing dome. Such a vast and populous metropolis would exponentially complicate their task.

“Fort-de-France,” said Drummond, as if encountering a long-lost friend.

“Not the one-washer town I had in mind,” Charlie said.

“Did you
know that you’re my sixth wife?” Stanley asked as their DC-8 heaved into the clouds above San Juan’s Luis Muñoz Marin International Airport.

“Fancy that, you’re my sixth too,” Hilary Hadley said. “Husband. Plus I had a wife once for an op at the Carnaval in Rio.”

In signing off on the covert action, Eskridge had suggested Stanley “honeymoon” in Martinique for the usual reasons: A “wife” would augment Stanley’s tourist cover. In fact, any companion adds credibility—a mere nod of corroboration by a second party almost always causes the target’s trust-governing synapse to fire. In addition, women are better able to elicit information from the Breams of the world, which is to say men.

Hadley had the sort of good looks that were accentuated by a charcoal suit, perfect for the part of a businesswoman, though Stanley sensed a free spirit beneath the Armani. He knew that some of the most gifted actors were drawn to clandestine service for the opportunity to lose themselves in roles for months at a time.

Not everyone who could act could deceive, however.

“So what do you know about us?” he asked.

“My passport, driver’s license, business cards, and all of the charge cards weighing down my insanely expensive Italian handbag say I’m Eleanor Parker Atchison, forty-seven and proud to admit it, a partner at Lerner, Marks and Hopkins, the law firm about which I’ll go on ad nauseam before it occurs to me to mention that I also have been married for seven years, to you, dear, Colin Wesley Atchison, CFO of GleamCo, an
industrial cleaning products conglomerate and a topic that gets your juices flowing much more readily than any aspect of
your
personal life, save golf. It is for your beloved pastime that we are currently en route to shop for a condo within a chip shot of Les Trois-Îlets’ Empress Joséphine course, designed by the incomparable Robert Trent Jones. We already own an adorable hundred-and-twenty-eight-year-old farmhouse in Litchfield, Connecticut, like every Tom, Dick, and Harriet in our Park Avenue social set, but we rarely use it because we prefer the office on Saturdays, when the phones are quiet, people don’t stick their heads through our doorways, and we can get things done.”

Stanley was impressed with her command of her cover. Even better was her ability to act the part: During the remaining hour of the flight, as they wove additional legend to fit their operational goals, Hadley turned into Eleanor Atchison before his eyes. He particularly liked the way her speech became clipped the moment conversation shifted to their domestic life—this was a woman with more important things on her mind. Yet when it came to the circumvention of Internal Revenue property tax codes, she was effusive, as if narrating a grand adventure.

As the DC-8 began its descent to Martinique, she argued that the quality of the material and the stitching made her handbag worth the extra nine hundred dollars. Although the argument was preposterous, her conviction left Stanley convinced.

He found himself admiring the play of the silk suit pants on her long legs, like gift wrap. Glimpsing her diamond ring and her wedding band, he felt a twinge of disappointment, before realizing that, like his own gold band, it was just cover.

“Not exactly
an ideal airport for fugitives,” Charlie said.

Night had settled over Martinique as Bream dropped the Gulfstream onto the runway. Ahead blazed a seaside airport as large as those in most American cities, or about a hundred times larger than Charlie had originally expected.

“The area for private jets is actually damn-near perfect,” Bream said, taxiing away from the main airport. “Otherwise we would’ve just hit Dominica or Saint Lucia and gotten a boat.”

They rolled perhaps a mile to the dimly lit “Executive Airport,” as the general aviation area was called. It included four single-aircraft hangars, a handful of charter service offices, and a red-roofed terminal that if it were any tinier wouldn’t qualify as a building. Beside the little terminal was a bar, where undulating pink lights revealed two people at the tables. On the tarmac, among the three dozen parked propeller planes, there was no sign of life.

Using a small motorized platform, Bream towed the Gulfstream into a rickety hangar that was equal parts rust and peeling silver paint. Once the jet was parked, he leaped off and lowered the hangar’s garage door, the cue that it was safe for Charlie and Drummond to come out of the cabin.

As they descended the stairs, Charlie was enveloped by air seemingly composed of droplets of hot water. Despite hard strains of jet fuel and exhaust, a light breeze carried a pleasing tropical scent.

Behind him, Drummond inhaled deeply and smiled. “Lily of the Valley.”

“It’s nice.”

“An interesting piece of information is that it’s poisonous.”

“Great.”

“I just got a text message,” said Bream, peering out the door’s grease-smeared plastic porthole. “There’s a coupla folks paying me a drop-by visit right now, so I’m gonna call an audible.” He tilted his head to a dark corner at the back of the hangar, his eyes flashing urgency. “You’d best get to know that storage closet in case they wanna come inside here.”

Charlie resisted an urge to run to the door, plant his face against the porthole, and see whoever had caused Bream’s reaction. Trying to maintain the appearance of normalcy, he took the remaining steps at a leisurely pace and merely glanced at the porthole. It offered a broad view of the tarmac between the hangar and the tiny terminal. He saw no one.

Drummond stood at the base of the stairway and stared outside, something that a new arrival who was not a fugitive would do.

“They’re waiting for me over in the bar,” Bream said. “American couple, name of Atchison, sent by a guy I know at Air France. Supposedly just tourists wallowing in cash, looking for a flying chauffeur.”

Charlie’s body temperature dropped. “But they’re not really just American tourists, are they?”

“Probably they really are. Probably this is just a case of bad timing. There are almost as many rich tourists on this island as there are palm trees. And I do pay the bills as a charter pilot here, so it’d attract attention if I ducked them.”

Chance, Charlie realized, had presented him with his first hard fact about Bream: The pilot was based in Martinique. He hadn’t mentioned it, but if he was local, it might mean that he was more involved in the operation than a mercenary parachuting in for the op, or “just a glorified courier,” as he’d claimed. Of course the text message—
alleged
text message—might just be a ruse to make Charlie think Bream was based in Martinique.

Either way, information about the pilot wouldn’t be worth much if CIA operatives were outside now.

Bream closed the cabin door and hurried to the tail of the plane. “To be on the safe side, wait here till they’re gone,” he said to Charlie. “Then you two will need to get a place to lay low for the night.” He flung open
the luggage compartment door, revealing a pair of overnight bags. “Between the light disguises and the new travel documents you’ll find in here, you shouldn’t have any trouble getting through customs, what there is of it. Especially ’cause ‘Capitain’ du Frongipanier is on duty. The guy got the job when he bombed as a crossing guard, and in ten years he hasn’t made it off the late shift.”

“I don’t get it,” Charlie said. “Are they trying to encourage people to sneak into Martinique?”

“Anybody who wants to sneak onto this rock can pull up at any one of a million places in a boat.” Bream slid the overnight bags out of the plane, dropped one before Charlie and the other by Drummond, then inched the luggage compartment door shut to avoid noise. “From this neck of the island, which is Lamentin, it’s a ten-minute cab ride up to Fort-de-France. Crash just for the night at someplace that looks like enough of a fleabag that it’s not on Interpol’s Fax Blast list, then tomorrow, find the goddamned bomb. And as soon as you’ve got it, give me a holler. Also if you run into any trouble, holler. And by holler I mean text me with the BirdBook that’s in your bag.”

Charlie assumed he’d misheard. “A bird book?”

Drummond said, “Encrypted communication system.”

“Pop’s pretty much on the money,” Bream said, hurrying out. “The BirdBook y’all’ve got’s really nothing more than a pimped-up BlackBerry—in fact, it’ll pass for a BlackBerry. What you do is, type the message to me straight, though a pinch of discretion won’t hurt, and the BirdBook will encrypt it.”

He exited through a side door, shutting it behind him, causing the entire hangar to quiver.

In spite of the enclosure and the darkness, Charlie had a sensation of being exposed. “What does it say that I feel less secure without Alice’s kidnapper around?”

“I was just going to ask you who he was,” Drummond said.

“Yep, the
Big Apple,” Stanley said, finishing off his pint of Stella lager. “Helluva town.”

His game plan was to lull Bream, who’d joined them at the little airport bar, into believing that he and Hadley were urban philistines. Then blindside him with a mention of one of the fugitives. Bream’s reaction could provide more insight than three hours on a polygraph.

“You know, it’s funny,” said Hadley, who was lit by the blinking Christmas lights atop the wire fence separating the bar from the edge of the tarmac. “Eighteen years I’ve been living there, and I’ve never learned why it’s called the Big Apple. I mean, no clue whatsoever.”